Issue of
November 19, 1997

A slice of Silicon Valley history: Libraries
acquire Apple collections

The Stanford University Libraries have acquired the museum and historical collections of Apple Computer Inc. as a gift.

The documents, hardware, software, videotapes, memorabilia and artifacts encompass the business and technological history of the company, as well as its corporate culture.

"The Apple collections, gathered by Apple's impressive library and archival staff, reflect what amounts to the Apple crusade, as led by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Mike Markkula and John Sculley," said Michael A. Keller, Stanford university librarian, director of Academic Information Resources and publisher of HighWire Press. "Stanford is proud to have received this well-organized and complete record of the Apple story to date."

Courtesy Stanford U. Libraries Dept. of Special Collections

This advertisement from the Feb. 10, 1981, issue of The Wall Street Journal describes the design principles behind the recently introduced Apple Macintosh.

The collections, which have been managed by records management and library staff at Apple since the mid-1980s, were intended for an Apple museum that was never built. They already have been moved to Stanford and will be housed and maintained for research use in the department of special collections in Green Library. Inventories and finding aids for researchers will be prepared during the coming year.

In addition to the museum collection, Apple is giving Stanford historical materials from the recently closed Apple corporate library in Cupertino. These include book and periodical collections about Apple computers and software, user group newsletters, artifacts, press releases and speeches. Records from the Apple Library Users Group and the Apple Library of Tomorrow program also are part of the gift.

The Apple Computer collections complement other collections at Stanford that document the recent history of science, technology and high-technology industry in nearby Silicon Valley. Since 1984 the libraries have focused on these collections under the auspices of the Stanford and the Silicon Valley Project.

Collections already acquired include the papers of Douglas Engelbart, Ed Feigenbaum, Ed Ginzton, Russell and Sigurd Varian, and William Shockley. Company records include those of Varian Associates, Fairchild Semiconductor, the System Development Foundation and the American Association for Artificial Intelligence. There also are oral histories, videotapes and film footage, publications and ephemera documenting the work of Stanford faculty, companies and individuals in industry.

"The donation of Apple's museum and historical archives adds significantly to Stanford's unmatched collections on the technological and business history of Silicon Valley," said Henry Lowood, library curator for the history of science and technology. "The unique documentation of corporate culture, personal computer design and software history in the Apple collection will be of particular value not only for research on the development of computer technology, but also for studies of the cultural and social impacts of computers on our lives." SR